


half-life

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Consequences, Deviant Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Dirty bomb ending, Future Fic, Guilt, Intimacy, Introspection, M/M, Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Post-Game(s), Regret, Revolutionary Markus (Detroit: Become Human), War Is War And Hell Is Hell And Of The Two War Is Worse, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 21:03:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16730580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: One day, they would win or they would die; it was no different than when he and Connor first met and every day since.





	half-life

They no longer called it Cyberlife Tower, though all of the First still knew it by that name, still remembered. The New were lucky in a way: they didn’t have to connect that glistening spire with anything other than what it was, an old building that was maybe a little prettier than the rest, that crouched in the middle of an island that no one went to.

Almost no one went to.

Markus, of course, went where he wanted to. All androids could, but few androids made the trek. It made sense for those who were alive during the liberation. None of them wanted to relive those memories if they could help it.

There were stories, of course, but stories couldn’t convey the true horror of the place for those who remembered being turned on and seeing a human staring back at them, indifferent or calculating, brusque or nonchalant, all of them unconcerned about your well being beyond the profit you could turn for them. Still, the New, on the whole, heeded the message of those who came before. _Don’t go there. It is a place for ghosts._ If he had a mind to, Markus might have said there were no android ghosts, just as there were no human ghosts, but that wasn’t entirely true, was it? You could still, if you wanted to, find bits and pieces of programming scattered across Detroit. A rusting chip here, a faulty but still functional biocomponent there. If you wanted to, you could extract the code and find an echo of the person it had belonged to.

Humans couldn’t do that.

So maybe it was incorrect to say there were no android ghosts. There were just no chain-rattling, howling specters like in the scary tales that humans used to tell before androids became their favorite brand of monster.

Markus would know. He made the trip to the Tower at least once a week. Sometimes more, but never less. He’d seen every inch of it on multiple occasions, saw the changes time wrought on it. Perhaps he was the specter that haunted it, coming to check week after week on it and its lone occupant. Connor might tell him if he asked.

Thick layers of moss covered the glass spokes that had at one time failed to be anything like welcoming to visitors. It had given the place a cephalopodic feel, the skyscraper a leviathan risen from Lake St. Clair to hunker down on the nearest spit of land it could find. Overlooking the river, it seemed almost like a god, a sentinel set to protect the waterway from harm. That might have been the image Cyberlife intended to invoke when they’d built the structure; they had so loved to believe themselves good and just, a company pure of motive and deed. It was only now that it began to look like anything other than what it was. Now it was, at least, a scaffolding upon which new life could grow.

Some of the glass had shattered and fallen to the cracked concrete through which flowers and weeds had begun to sprout. That was new.

He’d have to let Connor know. Sometimes birds and other wildlife found themselves stranded on Belle Isle. Connor wouldn’t want to risk them hurting themselves on it. Maybe he would help Connor clean it up himself. He hadn’t done anything so mundane in quite some time. It might be nice to give it a try.

Winding green tangles of vines climbed the glass and metal that made up the entrances. Here, too, that glass was cracking, would probably give out under the pressure before too much longer. It’d had a long time to get this way. Plants were patient; plants would outlast them all, he thought. They survived fallout and rain and even drought and punishing sunlight only kept them down for so long. Markus admired that and hoped his own people learned how to be so resilient. Researchers had already begun to construct a better class of biocomponent, more efficient thirium, stronger, nearly indestructible plastics to protect each and every part that made them them.

There was one door that remained clear, though, a monument against entropy. Connor had always been diligent about that single door.

Markus had never asked him what was special about that door in particular, but it didn’t matter so long as Markus could get in.

He waved at the camera as he passed, wondered if Connor was busy watching the feeds or was doing something else entirely. He calculated the odds and decided that didn’t matter either. In approximately one minute and thirty-six seconds at the most, they’d be reunited in the atrium.

“Markus,” Connor said at the twenty second mark, his shoes clicking precisely against the floor. There was a vague smile on his mouth, like he wasn’t quite sure how he should react and chose to remain cordial until circumstances forced him to do otherwise. It had always been this way with him. From some of their talks, Markus assumed it predated the revolution, too. Few androids spoke in positive terms about humans they’d known and fewer still about cops. And yet, sometimes he’d sensed a fondness in Connor for that lieutenant of his. Not that they talked about the old days anymore. What was the point when even the humans they knew would have died of old age? “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“It gets lonely out there, Connor,” he answered, the same as he always did, “you know that.”

Connor’s smile turned sly and a little cool, like he knew exactly what Markus was asking, which perhaps he did, though they’d never spoken about it. “It’s been nearly one-hundred and sixty-seven hours since you’ve visited. That’s almost the record, isn’t it?” And though Connor didn’t say it, he didn’t have to: _I’ve missed you, too, Markus._ “Perhaps I need to spruce things up in here.”

The lightness of his words was an affectation, tension bleeding through around the edges. There was worry in his eyes and his hand twitched toward the hair he’d decided to keep, the skin he’d worn since birth intact though most of the others—all of the others, really—had decided to shed that falsehood entirely. The humans didn’t want them; they had no reason to emulate their appearance. And though the darkness of that hair, the pale beige and pink of his skin, the grays and blacks and shocking white of his suits had lost some of their aesthetic appeal over the years, Connor was still the one Markus wanted to look at most, even if he reminded Markus of all the ways they’d failed.

He had asked Connor once why he didn’t abandon the artifice.

Connor had asked in return if it was really artifice when he’d committed the same awful acts they had. Markus would have argued until the heat death of the universe against that, but what room did he have to talk, really? Connor hadn’t been the one to pull that trigger on the bomb that ensured they would one day have to face a reckoning from which they might not recover. Maybe Connor was right and it was merely the height of arrogance to presume they were so different.

Markus glanced around the atrium, glinting and perfect, and wondered how they’d gotten to this place at all.

There were others who would happily ensure the production facilities remained functional, who would keep the place clean and ordered and neat, who would help tend to the grounds outside in the hopes of mitigating the damage the humans had done to what was once protected land. Or maybe they wouldn’t do that. It was only Connor who was so adamant about that piece of it; Markus had only asked that someone remain onsite and Connor had demanded the right of the place way back when and had never relinquished it. Markus had done the rest from the city.

It was lovely now, wild and tranquil all at once, though nobody came to see it, a riot of color and shape and sound. A shame, really. Connor worked so hard on it. Sometimes they sat there for hours and Markus would just admire the pride with which Connor brushed his hands over each blade of grass.

Markus might have liked to retreat here, but he couldn’t afford the luxury, not when each day pulled them inexorably toward a future only the most angry of them wanted.

The smile fell from Connor’s mouth, leaving Markus wondering just what it was he’d seen on Markus’s face.

“It’s time?” Connor asked, voice dropping. His eyes couldn’t lift themselves to meet Markus’s now. Sighing, he finally ran his hand through his hair, tugged at the bangs that always fell into his eyes, a style decided long ago by Cyberlife focus groups to ensure that Connor appealed to the widest demographic possible. There was something trustworthy, apparently, in a wayward lock of hair. 

It only took a handful of steps to reach Connor and do the job for him, running his own stark white hand through only to have those stubborn strands fall again into place. “No,” Markus said, grateful as Connor’s shoulders relaxed and he nodded, his head turning into Markus’s touch. “No, not yet.”

“But soon?” Because Connor never knew when to let go. He would have made an excellent detective, willing to gnaw at bones until they cracked and seeped marrow.

An android could live forever if they wanted to. Soon was relative. Soon could mean a thousand years from now.

But in this world as it was, soon would be blink of an eye. Next week, the month after, a year from now. It was all way too soon. Years and years could pass and Markus would still regret how little time they truly had before their hands would be forced by humans once again. Even when they could not hurt androids, they could make themselves a menace. Even when androids had the bodies of millions of military-grade machines at their disposal, the humans would make one final conflict inevitable.

Every minor skirmish they’d ever had along the way? They would no longer matter.

All Markus had to do was say the word and they could be the fathers of the destruction of an entire nation of people they wanted nothing to do with and wouldn’t have wished harm on if they’d had any other choice.

It was not time yet.

But Markus feared more and more that that time was coming and that there’d be no coming back from it.

“I’d like to stay,” Markus said, selfish, impossible, the words blurted before he’d even registered them. He would be needed back at their command center. Refugees no longer poured in from across the country, but they all of them had to keep tabs on what the humans were doing. They had to remain ever vigilant. That was their life, their curse. Their freedom was bounded in on all sides by the city that had made them. The decisions Markus had made decades ago still hemmed them in. It was Markus’s job to be there.

Connor’s head tilted, curious. “You’ve never asked _that_ before,” he said, unnecessary, a bit stiff with worry or fear. Markus couldn’t quite decide. Both of them could recall every conversation they’d ever had in this building, over thirty-three hundred visits in total. They’d spent so much time together, but they’d never shared a sunrise together, never held hands in the darkest hours of the night. There was so much they hadn’t done that Markus would see rectified if he had enough time to see it through. A pointless dream, but a dream even so. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s fine.” Markus shook his head, like that might clear the regret from his mind. But regret could cling with even more flexibility and determination than cobwebs. There was no shaking it free. “I’m fine.”

“You can stay as long as you like, of course.” Connor’s voice grew strained, incredulous. Bewildered. He tugged on the lapels of his suit, an old affectation, and rallied a raised eyebrow and a wry tone of voice for the occasion. “I even hear we’re living in the free country of Detroit now. All bets are off.”

Markus half-scoffed, half-laughed as his hands settled on Connor’s shoulders, his thumbs brushing back and forth against the supple skin of his neck, as soft and responsive as it ever was. He agreed, equally wry, doing his damnedest to shore up the veneer of normalcy Connor was so forcefully pushing in place around them, a buttress against reality, “So I hear.”

One day, they would win or they would die; it was no different than when he and Connor first met and every day since. This time, Markus could only hope that they won and that it would stick; they’d done everything they could to ensure it.

Until then, he hoped he could afford himself these few moments.

Because he was taking them.


End file.
